Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

5 A tribute at the service of thanksgiving for the life and work of Guilford Marsh Bell, OBE, 191 2-92, Christ Church, South Yarra, Melbourne, 15 January 1992 We are gathered here today to give thanks to God for the life and work of Guilford Marsh Bell, OBE. I regard it as a great honour to have been invited, out of the hundreds of his friends, many much better equipped for this task than I, to deliver this final tribute to his memory. My qualifications, such as they are, to do this, are simple ones. I have known Guilford since childhood. We were connected, albeit distantly, by marriage. Our families have been friends for several generations. My wife and I live in a house which Guilford designed for us. I have served with him on Government committees, and I have been a fellow member of several clubs and societies. For as long as I can remember, I have valued his friendship, admired his achievements, and enjoyed his company. There is an old saying, attributed to one of the early Greek philosophers: 'Better an eagle in old age than a sparrow in youth'. Guilford was certainly an eagle in old age, but at the same time he was never a sparrow in youth. Even then he was an eagle. Professor Joseph Burke, who wrote the introduction to the great book which describes his architecture over thirty years-and there is a further decade of achievement since that book was written-said of him to a close friend only recently, 'As an architect he was a young master as well as an old master', and no words of mine could sum up his career better than those. Guilford came to architecture, surprisingly enough, at the suggestion of his father, when h_e was about to finish his education at The Kings School, Parramatta. I say surprisingly because the Bells have been graziers in Queensland ever since their arrival in 1807, and one might have expected his father to press him to follow the family path. Guilford, himself, was surprised. He told me that he did not realise until much later that his father was a classical scholar and had a large and wide-ranging library. He was also clearly a very perceptive man, and Australia owes him a debt of aesthetic gratitude for setting his son on this other path. It took Guilford to England for six years to drink in the man-made beauty of the old world, and to the Bartlett School of Architecture at London University to study under Sir Albert Richardson. It took him, at the invitation of Sir Max Mallowen--best known perhaps as the husband of Agatha Christie, for whom Guilford later restored a country house in Devonshire-to Syria, as architect to an archaeological expedition. He was greatly impressed by what he saw. Many years later, he wrote: 'Almost every city house I design has its roots in Middle Eastern architecture, where one enters the house through a single opening in a protective wall and comes into the environment of a garden and inner buildings. People feel safe in such a place'. Syria was followed by the War, when Guilford served as a Flying Officer in the RAAF in the Pacific. He then joined Reginald Ansett as the company's architect and remained there for several years. 148